Free Nine Years Gone by Chris Culver

answer on the off chance that it was the school calling to say something had happened. I pulled the phone from my pocket and looked at the caller ID.
    Katherine.
    I ran my thumb across the screen to answer and put the phone to my ear.
    “Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?”
    “I need to see you.”
    Her voice sounded taut with anxiety, and any thought I had about work evaporated.
    “Are you all right?”
    “I’m fine, but I need to see you right away.”
    Since I write crime fiction, worst-case scenarios dominate my thought processes. When Katherine is late coming home from work, my mind skips past the mundane explanations—heavy traffic, last-minute errands, late appointments, whatever—and automatically jumps to the macabre. I picture her in a car accident or as the victim of a crime, or something equally grotesque. The list of things that could go wrong at work was comparatively short, but one stood out above the rest: my wife was pregnant, and not for the first time. She’d miscarried at ten weeks a couple of months back, and it broke her heart.
    “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

11
    I ran the dog home and then took the interstate east, exiting near Forrest Park, just a couple of blocks from my wife’s hospital. Cars whizzed by me as I parked on a side street just off of Kings Highway Boulevard, but I couldn’t think about anything but Katherine. As soon as I got into the hospital and introduced myself to the receptionist on my wife’s floor, a nurse whisked me back to an unoccupied exam room. Katherine wasn’t there yet, so I leaned against the exam table and closed my eyes, bracing myself for the bad news and trying to think of something comforting I could say.
    Katherine opened the door about five minutes later wearing a black pencil skirt and white shirt beneath her lab coat. I stood.
    “Are you okay?” I asked.
    She crossed her arms but stayed in the doorway. A neat ponytail held her dark hair away from her face, accentuating the redness of her cheeks and eyes. I walked toward her, but she brought a hand up quickly before I could get within arm’s length.
    “Don’t touch me.”
    I took a step back and tilted my head to the side, surprised. “What’s wrong?”
    She closed the door and then pushed past me to drop a manila folder on the exam table.
    “You tell me,” she said.
    She crossed her arms again, and I reached for the folder. At one time, it had been taped shut as if it had gone through the mail, but only a stamp from TopFlite Courier Services and the hospital’s address adorned the exterior. I slid my finger along the top edge, unsettling the glue, before reaching inside and pulling out a stack of photographs of Tess and me at the gun range, including one of her kissing me goodbye. Whoever had taken the shots had smudged out Tess’s face, obscuring her identity, but my face was clearly visible.
    I put the pictures down and looked up.
    “Is this what you’ve been doing while I work late?” Katherine asked, her face growing redder.
    “No,” I said, shaking my head. “No. I . . . I don’t . . .”
    “Who is she?”
    “It’s not what it looks like.”
    “Then what is it?” she asked, crossing her arms. “Are they pictures of you and another woman or not?”
    “That’s what they are, but it’s not what you think. Can we talk about this at home?”
    Katherine raised her eyebrows and then pointed to the ground. “We can talk about this here.”
    I admire a lot of things about my wife, not the least of which is her willingness to stick up for herself and those she cares about. The pictures hurt her—I knew that—and had we been at home, I would have come clean with her about everything. But admitting that I had framed someone for murder didn’t seem like the smartest move in such a public setting.
    “We need to talk about this at home,” I said. “Trust me. I’ve got a good reason for not talking here.”
    “Who is she?”
    “I understand that you’re